Label Styles - Anchors and Attachments

In the past few weeks I have had several people asking about label styles and how to place the text in the correct place with relation to an object. For starters I would look at some of the label styles that ship with AutoCAD Civil 3D templates. These can be a great place to start looking for styles that may be modified to meet your company's standards.

But, what if you can't find a style to modify to look like the particular label that you want? Well, that's when we get to be a little creative. Let's take a look at creating a Point Label Style. For Visual effect create a point using the create points command from the Points menu. Accept all of the defaults when creating the point. Then click on the point, right-click and select edit points. This brings up the Point Editor Panaorama Vista. Scroll over to the right until you see the columns labeled Point Style and Point Label Style. When you first select the point and scroll to the columns listed above the fields will probably be blank, unless you have specified a particular point style or point label style.

Click in the field for Point Style. This will bring up the Select Point Style Dialog box. Choose Basic from the pull-down menu and then select Edit Current Style from the button to the right of the pull-down menu. Change the marker style to "X" by clicking on the "X" button under Use Cutom Marker. Then click OK twice to get back to the Points Editor.

Next Click in the field for Point Label Style. This will bring up the Select Label Style Dialog Box. In this dialog box click the down arrow to the right of the button and Select Create New.

This will bring up the Label Style Composer Dialog box. On the Information tab give your new style a name. Click on the General Tab. Here you can set the text style, visibility and layer for you new point label style. (Hint: In 2009 the Standard Text Style maps to the Simplex font.) Next click on the Layout Tab. This is where all of the fun begins! The very first thing that you will see is a pull down menu called Component Name. To the right there are four buttons. These buttons are: Create Component, Copy Component, Delete Component and Component Draw Order. Click on the Create Component pull-down. You have options for creating text, line and block components. Choose Text to create a text component. Since we are dealing with Point Label Stlyes there will be three components present in the Component Name pull-down.

In the field for Name under the General Node give your text component a name. For instance let's create a component for the Northing of the point. So we name the new component "Northing." We will leave the visibility set to true so that we can see the new component. The next field assigns the anchor component. Now, If we are creating a breand new label and we have no other text components in the style, we will have to anchor the new text component to the feature. If we have other text components we may choose to anchor to the feature or one of the other text components. When we have decided what to anchor our new text component to, we have to choose the anchor point.

The screen capture above shows the nine possible anchor points associated with our point object. The anchor points are: Top Left, Top Center, Top Right, Middle Left, Middle Center, Middle Right, Bottom Left, Bottom Center and Bottom Right. The same nine anchor points are available if we choose to anchor our new text to an existing text component also. Just remember that each of the text components that we create also have attachment points that correspond to the nine positions shown above. So, what does that mean for us? That gives us a multitude of options for creating our labels.

Some other options for our labels are that we can use the x- and y-spacing to offset the attachment point from the anchor point if we need more space between the label and the object. (Think station labels.) We can also add rotation angles into the label style. The thing to watch out for here is that if we rotate the text component that is attached to the feature, we do not rotate the text components attached to that particular text component.

This is an overview of creating a point label. Be adventurous and explore the options for other types of labels.

Grading Short Course Notes Part 3

Okay, let's finish this site. The first thing we need to do is create a new site. We will do this the same way we created the Temporary site in the Part 2 of these notes. We will change the name of this site to "Final Site."

Next, we will click on the Grading menu at the top of the screen and select "Create Feature Lines from Objects." Select the poly line that surrounds the parking lot and building pad. The Create Feature Lines dialog box will open. We want to make sure that our site is set to Final Site. If it is not, select it from the pull down menu. We will set the style of our feature line to Basic, and make sure that we are on the C-TOPO-FEAT layer. Select the feature line that we just created and right-click. Select "Elevation Editor." From the tool bar select the Elevations from Surface icon.

The Select Surface dialog box will appear. Select the Temporary Surface that we created in Part 2. You will notice that the elevation for each vertice is updated. If, by chance, your Temporary Surface does not encompass the feature line you will have some vertices that have a zero elevation. This can be fixed by assigning an elevation to those vertices in the elevation editor or you can use the "Set Grade/Slope Between Points" icon from the Feature Lines Toolbar. If you use the "Set Grade/Slope Between Points" command, you will be asked to select the starting point and elevation and the ending point and Grade/Slope/Elevation. (Just follow the prompts on the command line.)

Next we will select "Create Grading" from the Grading Menu. On the Grading Creation Tools Toolbar we are going to select the leftmost icon to set the grading group. In the Site Name pull down menu we will select our Final Site. Then to the right of the Grading Group Name pull down you will see two (2) icons. We will select the icon on the far right - the "Create Grading Group" icon. In the Create Grading Group dialog box enter the name of Parking, select the Automatic surface Creation box and select the Use the Group Name check box. Then click "OK."

Back on the Grading Creation Tools toolbar we want to select the "Set Surface" icon, second from left, and set the surface to EG. Next we will set the Grading Criteria to "Grade to Surface." you will be asked to select a feature line. Select the feature line to which we set the elevations from our Temporary Surface. When prompted to select a side to grade, pick outside of the feature line, i.e an area that is not inside the parking lot or building footprint. You will be prompted to apply the grading to the entire length. Enter "NO." When prompted for a starting point use your endpoint OSNAP to select the endpoint of the feature line on the right side of the driveway at the entrance to the site. When prompted for the end point select the endpoint on the west side of the driveway. Follow the prompts on the command line. If you desire to change the cut or fill slope go ahead. I used a 5:1 cut and a 6:1 fill slope in my example. The grading limits and proposed contours should be shown on the screen.

Go back to the Grading Menu and select "Create Infill." Pick a point inside the parking lot to create the infil. This should connect the contour lines accross the parking area.

The screen capture above shows the site with the tie-in grading and infill grading through the parking lot.

Next, we will create feature lines from the outlines for the islands in the parking lot. Select one of the islands and right-click. Select "Select Similar" from the pop-up menu. Click on the Grading Menu and select "Create Feature Lines from Objects." In the Create Feature Lines dialog box set the style to "Bottom Curb," select the Erase Existing Entities check box and select the Assign Elevations check box. Click "OK." In the Assign Elevations dialog box change the surface to Parking and click OK. Click on the Grading Menu and select "Create Infill." click inside each island to create an infill for the islands.

A warning here... You will probably have to go back and create another infill for the parking area. When I stepped through this exercise, the centroid of the infill grading that I created after tying my parking surface into the EG suface fell inside one of my islands. That is not an issue, you may just have to create another infill for the rest of the parking lot.

Now let's click on the Grading menu and place our mouse over "Edit Feature Line Geometry." You should get a fly-out menu. Select "Stepped Offset" from that menu. We will now offset the curb feature lines to the inside a distance of 0.5 feet and an elevation difference of 0.5 feet.

We need to create a feature line from the polyline that represents the edge of pavement for the parking lot. When creating the feature line, assign elevations from the parking surface. Then using the same commands create an offest of the edge of pavement o.5 feet to the outside and o.5 feet elevation difference. This will create a curb around the parking area. The only step left is to create a feature line for the building and assign an elevation to it. Again, you may have to create another infill for the area bounded by the tie-in grading, the building pad and the back of the curb around the parking area. When you have completed these steps, you should have something that looks like this:

The only thing left to do here is create our detention facility. I am going to leave that to your imagination.

Grading Short Course Notes Part 2

In the last post we created an existing ground surface, inserted the layout into the drawing file and exploded the block, created an alignment and profile from the polyline that runs north and south through the entrance of the site.

Now, we want to create a preliminary surface to assign elevations to some of the feature lines that we will use to create our final grading surface. We will start by creating a new site. Right-click on Sites in Toolspace and select "New." In the dialog box we are going to change the name to "Temporary."

Let's create a feature line from the alignment that we created last time. From the Grading pull-down menu we will select "Create Feature Lines from Alignment." Selecting the alignment in the drawing will bring up the Create Feature Line from Alignment dialog box.

In the Create Feature Line from Alignment dialog box we want to make sure that the site is "Temporary." Next we will select the design profile that we created last time and wew want to make sure that the "Create Dynamic Link to the Alignmnet" box IS checked.

After we click OK, the Weed Vertices dialog box will appear. We will accept the default settings for now. Now we will create the temporary surface. Click on the Grading menu at the top of the screen and select "Create Grading." This will activate the Grading Creation Tools Toolbar. On the Grading Creation Tools Toolbar we will select the leftmost icon. This is the Create Grading Group icon. The Create Grading Group dialog box will appear.

In the Create grading dialog box we will type in the name "Temporary Surface." Next, select the Automatic Surface Creation check box, select the Use the Group Name check box and change the surface style if you want to. Finally, we will click OK to create the Grading Group and click OK to create the surface.

On the Grading Creation Tools Toolbar we will set the grading criteria to "Grade to Distance." We will create two gradings here. First, select the feature line and select the right side as the side to grade to. Accept the default answer of "Yes" when prompted to apply to entire length. On the right side we will grade to a distance of 150 feet. When the command line prompts for a grade or slope, type in G for grade and hit enter. Use a grade of 3.00%. On the left side we will grade to a distance of 400 feet at a grade of -2.00%.

Your site should look similar to the image above. This concludes Part 2 of the Grading Short Course notes. Next time we will complete the grading of our site.

Grading Short Course Notes Part 1

Wow! I want to thank everyone that showed up for Alacad's first Short Course for Civil 3D users in the Mobile Area! The turn out was fabulous. Thank you all for participating and asking questions that I know others were wanting to ask. Okay....enough of the niceties, let's get to the dirt!

This short course walked through one method of grading a small commercial site with a building and parking areas. At the end we added a detention facility, too. To get started we had a drawing that consisted of an Existing Surface from an aerial photograph.

Now, if you will recall I talked about one of the new features for creating surfaces in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009. That new feature is a Data Clip Boundary. When creating a surface from a large data set we create the Data Clip Boundary as the first operation. Then as we add data to our surface, i.e. points, point groups, breaklines, etc., the software will check the data to see if it falls inside the limits of the Data Clip Boundary. If the data is outside the boundary it is ignored.

Once we have our existing ground surface created, it is time to do some fun stuff! The next thing was to import the layout for the site as shown below.

Next, we created an alignment from the polyline that runs north and south through the parking lot. In creating the alignment we did not place the alignment on a site and we gave it a name of baseline. This makes it easier when creating the preliminary surface. Then we created an EG profile and profile view of the alignment. Next we create our design profile. This profile can be created with tangents only, or you could include vertical curve data.

Join me next time for Part 2 of the Grading Short Course notes.